Deep Mountain

A personal and political journey to the heart of the Turkey-Armenia conflict, by Turkey’s most famous female journalist.

From the Armenian communities of Venice Beach and Paris, to Turkey and Armenia, Deep Mountain is a nuanced and moving exploration of the living history and continuing denial of the Armenian genocide. Encountering writers, thinkers and activists from across the Turkish-Armenian divide, Ece Temelkuran weaves together an absorbing account of the role of national myths and memories, and how they are sustained and distorted over time, both within Turkey and Armenia, as well as among the vast Armenian diasporas of France and America. Deep Mountain is both a brilliant, personal exploration of one of the most enduring and intractable issues of our time, and an illuminating look at the part nationalism plays in the way we see ourselves and others.

Reviews

“Ece Temelkuran dissects the process by which false and true national memories are created and why they are sustained ... This is a book that transforms this ancient Armenian-Turkish dispute into a human drama.”

– Theodore Zeldin

Blog

On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated what was left of the network of concentration, labour and extermination camps near Auschwitz in southern Poland. The first part of the camp they stumbled upon was Buna-Monowitz (Monowice), or Auschwitz III, a satellite of the central Auschwitz-Birkenau complex which was run by the Nazis in collaboration with the industrial chemical corporation IG Farben. Until days earlier, 12,000 enslaved labourers, mostly Jews, had been kept there in appalling conditions.

Amongst the several hundred sick and dying left behind by the retreating Nazis were two Italian Jews, both from Turin: 46-year-old doctor Leonardo De Benedetti and 25-year-old chemistry graduate Primo Levi.

We did not know that you have put up with us that long, Commander. You have been disgusted by us and hidden it from us. You have wanted us to be gassed and dispersed like insects for years? You never even wanted us to find a doctor when we desperately needed one? No lawyer should come to defend us. You wanted cops to come and take us and then nothing to be heard of us later. You even wanted us not to be able to breathe, to suffocate where we found shelter. Otherwise why would you order your cops and gendarmes to march on us, detain doctors and not even inform our lawyers where we are? You have always been disgusted by us, Commander. Come on, confess it. Confess and let's finish this game of lies.

The legacy of the history and historiography of the 1915 Armenian genocide is a fraught one. Ece Temelkuran's Deep Mountain: Across the Turkish-Armenian Divide, an exploration of the controversial subject of the living history and continuing denial of the Armenian genocide, has attracted both high praise and strong criticisms from different quarters.

For the New Left Project, Jamie Stern-Weiner describes Deep Mountain as "a thoughtful reflection on the personal and communal politics of nationalism". Introducing his interview with Temelkuran, he summarizes his thoughts on the book thusly:

Its value, in my view, lies primarily in its exposition of the subjective experience of nationalism and the ways in which personal and communal identity can become bound up with political demands.

While Stern-Weiner's views are characteristic of the more positive reviews, the book has also garnered a response of a very different kind. G. M. Goshgarian writing for New Politics has penned a scathing attack on the book which he deems as "genocide denial light". In an in-depth and comprehensive piece, he explains that he was baffled as to why Verso had published a book that, in his words, could be best be likened to "latter-day national- socialist treatments of the holocaust". With the aim of facilitating an open dialogue on this sensitive issue, it is interesting to present his critique here. Goshgarian hopes that his review will add to a wider discussion that "may help spark a badly needed clarification of the ambiguities muddying the political and ideological movement that has spawned Temelkuran's book."